Well by jove it’s been a royal old time since I last wrote here, largely because my sites were hacked and a complete rebuild was needed, and also the sd card in the pi also corrupted recently, boooooooo. Anyhow, now we’re all back online and I’m proudly presenting the culmination of many months of tech and thought –
Starting out as a fun way to build some new Blender animation tools, I now give you Animates 🙂
It’s been quite the journey; at first I wanted to ensure my students had some tools that more easily enabled them to navigate the complexity of the graph editor in Blender, bearing in mind these awesome teenagers have seldom used a 3d package before, understanding the fickle nature of keys and curves, constant and bezier is alot. Then trying to knead that loose knowledge into functional processes and keyboard shortcuts can take time, not something that we have spades of whilst teaching. Looking at arrows on buttons, pressing those icons and images can help fast in workflows, so in yearning after Animbot’s incredible suite of tools for Maya, I set out to harness some of the same processes for my students.
Within a short period of time the toolset was expanding, and it hasn’t stopped yet. I now have a wonderful website (yes, it runs off a pi) and accreditation on a number of websites:
Superhive is a fabulous site, the go-to for Blender addons, not only do you get the cream of the crop but also, many, myself included contribute a percentage of sales to the Blender Foundation – supporting the awesome community.
It is also hosted on Animworks, a very cool site newly setup for the animation community by Harvey Newman
Here’s a rundown of the main Animates Suite currently from June 2026 –
I am particularly smug describing my favourite tool, which is also sold separately, The Editable Motion Path tool (and onion skins bundled in) –
it’s a path that can be incredibly easily manipulated to have a more intuitive, visual control over the motion of the animation; it works blazingly fast, on multiple bones or objects (cameras, lights etc) and comes with a rich set of tools allowing broad moving, sculpting and smoothing changes. Also it can support broad movements, and rotations, across multiple elements simultaneously with a Master Arc function, giving singular points across one path to manipulate. I love the tool, it is a thing of blender beauty.
